I thought i let everybody know that it has just been announced that call of duty ghost will have dedicated servers on all systems!!! So hopefully i will have a better experience than i had with black ops 2 and all the host migrations, lag and bad hit detection!!!! let me know what you think and you know anything about dedicated servers and how they will benefit us, let us know!!

I was laughing when I first heard about it back in MW3. They're damn real, man. I honestly thought they were a sick joke and then I looked at the available dedis on MW3 PC and a lot of them are crouch only.

“And, in order to make sure that people have the best possible experience regardless of platform, location or connection, Ghosts will be using a hybrid system of dedicated servers and listen servers. So no matter where you are the game will always be trying to give you the best online performance possible. There is also some great new tech in the matchmaking system that will place players in matches that have the best combined overall connectivity performance."

Will likely put many players in a tailspin as they may not be able to run around corners and gun people down before they show up on the poor sap's screen. A lot of the community unknowingly relies on that advantage right now. A fair playing field is going to piss some people off and they'll still have no clue as to what's been going on over the last year with BO in general.

People seem to think dedis are some sort of golden magical bullet that will cure every ill you experience online, this unfortunately isn’t the case at all. What dedi’s will bring to the table for consoles are things like no host migrations, from the dedis side a smooth experience that isn’t affected by the the (as in old games) hosts own bandwidth causing issues. More security in game as the ability for the nefarious to run unsigned code as hosts on chipped xboxes is gone.The one major issue with any online gaming experience is your ping, it doesn’t matter how much bandwidth you have, how advanced your home network is ultimately your online experience if you have a stable connection is down to ping. Ping for those who aren’t familiar with the term is the time it takes data to travel from your console/pc to a server and back.One advantage listen servers (p2p as some call it) ie the system CoD has always used over dedis is host location, While the host may not always have been the best the chances are the host would’ve been quite close to you.

With dedi’s it comes down to locations of the servers, The golden rule for dedis has always been the closer you are the better your ping is, while this maybe slightly generalized as a statement as there are other factors like your own connection quality ect this is how dedis usually work for players. Saying that though players on dedis will find their games run better and everyone will be a lot more equal as there is now no host advantage/disadvantage depending what side of the fence you were on that one.

One of the things IW would’ve looked at before deciding to go down the dedi route is server locations, if they couldn’t provide locations that gave very good coverage they would not have gone down this route. BUT thats not to say at present all geographic locations will have great coverage. Some more outlying or low population area’s will still potentionally have dedis depending on that area being covered by Azure. but you may find those servers are further afield than you would like to connect too and I would assume (*disclaimer this is an ASSUMPTION by me). That there would still be back up systems in the game to use listen servers for down times of dedis and for low pop areas or areas that are not covered by azure.

Matchmaking changes

One of the things that alot of people mention is matchmaking, and anyone who knows me from these forums knows it’s an area I have clashed heads with IW over numerous times in the past . There has been a lot of work done on matchmaking and Ghosts will see a few new features added to matchmaking that will improve how matchmaking works. One of the most important ones for me (as its something I repeatedly highlighted) was the fact geolocation especially for european players had an inherent flaw . due to the way Ip blocks are bought and sold by european isps it was possible to be in the middle of the UK but the game thought you were in Italy. To counter this Ghosts will match make using your actual internet distance (and hops) rather than basing any matchmaking off your actual physical location. This will ensure players are better matched and potentially will be matched more locally. Iw trawled through a ton of connection metrics during MW3 and have taken a lot of feedback and comments from the community when it came to matchmaking. I spoke to Mark Rubin during my time out in La during E3 and I was very impressed with some of the idea’s he and the team had either come up with or discussed.

Now the more astute of you here might now be wondering why if we are getting dedis on some platforms (ie the confirmed ones so far before the ps4 crowd go wait a minute..) why we still need matchmaking? – The answer is even with dedis the game still needs to place you into a session (game lobby) that gives you the best experience.

That would be me, and what exactly is wrong with me asking where the servers will be located ? I did also write that it's understandable if they are located in the most populated areas, and that i can get a decent ping on those servers that they used with BO2 even if they are nowhere near me. It's not like i'm crying in advance in order to get a server here to Finland, but obviously their location would be usefull info. I'm sure many people will complain about not having one close to them, but that's not what my question was about.

eople will still complain. But overall for the entire community, I think things will get better.

From my personal experience with dedis whenever I had an issue connection wise, it was on my end, so I could fix it. If someone decides to play with 2 tin cans and a string, its there problem not mine.

I have to wonder for myself will I be a superbeast in Ghosts or will I become cannon fodder? I suspect that my connection is on par or better than most but it's certainly not the best available. This should prove interesting.

I think overall people will continue to do as well or poorly reflecting their skill level. Of course lag is a big issue but I'm betting not as many people suffer it consistently as belied by the large number of complaints.

I'm hoping the same, but chances are they will be only on certain areas that have the highest amount of players, which is understandable. They did test servers in BO2, maybe they will use the same ones.

I live in Finland, if they use the same servers from Choopa also in Ghosts for the current gen, i had a ~50ms ping to those and if i remember correctly the servers i played on were in the UK, France and Germany. It's okay but obviously the lower the ping is the better. And matchmaking is still the key, if they continue to make lobbies with people from all across Europe in them. latency will be an issue.

If they don't have one near me, good matchmaking and listen servers might produce better results in my case. I monitored my traffic while playing MW2 and got either host or connected to a host with less than 30ms ping and the gameplay was smooth, and this was a few weeks ago in a game with very little players left in it. The current matchmaking system BO2 uses matches me with people from Spain and France pretty consistently, so if that's not improved the dedis will (in my experience) help a bit in some cases but still provide a less than ideal experience pretty often.

After hearing about this, and seeing the Squads trailer (as sometimes I like to play against bots when I nobody is online)... I feel more confident that I will be in for a better overall gaming experience than we have had in the past 3 years.

Although the game will have problems and people will have (real and imaginary) complaints, is it too early to say: "YAY"?

As usual i believed the hype and already paid for a PS3 copy, which i'll probably end up upgrading to a PS4 version. I also feel more confident about them finally delivering more consistent connections, let's hope the matchmakng changes improve the experience because it's not been that great for the past 3 years.

If it runs like MW2 in terms of connection (i'm hopefull but sceptical on that), Ghosts might be a really good game because there also seems to be less BS like deathstreaks in it too, which IW previously included.

Bugs and system or server crashes will happen, they are annoying but something that seems to happen with a lot of games nowadays. I'm confident those will be patched ASAP, but delivering consistent connections is something both developers in the series have been struggling with so i'm hoping for an improvement there.

I'm also pretty sure no ones system has actually been destroeyd by these games even with all the freezing issues. The lasers die eventually which probably is the most common problem (this happened to my old fat 40gb model), the system can overheat during a long session, and there have been other types of HW malfunctions like the "heat paste"-issue (don't know what to call it in english) that are not caused by any certain title.

It's clear to me that there was a trial with dedi's during bo2, and without knowing I was part of it. I say this because I had about six months of very good gameplay (not perfect, but v good) and not a single host migration. Had migrations early on and get them now so I wasn't on them the whole time. The difference looking back is noticeable, but as already pointed out, it won't eliminate lag/latency. That said, this is good news for those who will be lucky enough to be on Dedi's. The moaning will still pour in from those who aren't, and from those who thought dedi's would resolve everything.

Yep I think the only thing that dedi's really bring to the table is consistency in whatever lag you are experiencing. So one match to the next should feel about the same even if you still feel a little behind the action. To me that unto itself is an improvement because you can get used to having a certain amount of lag and accommodate for it much easier than what could be for some the swinging pendulum lag effect that they currently endure. In my matches my lag is fairly consistent but it does fluctuate. However, when they were running dedi's my hit detection was pretty reliable.